To see her, without a convulsion of her small pink face, not even
feign to glance in the direction of the prodigy I announced,
but only, instead of that, turn at ME an expression of hard,
still gravity, an expression absolutely new and unprecedented
and that appeared to read and accuse and judge me--
this was a stroke that somehow converted the little girl
herself into the very presence that could make me quail.
I quailed even though my certitude that she thoroughly saw
was never greater than at that instant, and in the immediate
need to defend myself I called it passionately to witness.
"She's there, you little unhappy thing--there, there, THERE,
and you see her as well as you see me!" I had said shortly
before to Mrs. Grose that she was not at these times a child,
but an old, old woman, and that description of her could not
have been more strikingly confirmed than in the way in which,
for all answer to this, she simply showed me, without a concession,
an admission, of her eyes, a countenance of deeper and deeper,
of indeed suddenly quite fixed, reprobation. I was by this time--
if I can put the whole thing at all together--more appalled
at what I may properly call her manner than at anything else,
though it was simultaneously with this that I became aware
of having Mrs. Grose also, and very formidably, to reckon with.
My elder companion, the next moment, at any rate, blotted out
everything but her own flushed face and her loud, shocked protest,
a burst of high disapproval.
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